


New Eyes

by vogue91



Category: Original Work
Genre: Character Death, F/M, Flashbacks, Germany, Introspection, Nature, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-16
Updated: 2018-11-16
Packaged: 2019-08-24 10:33:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16638284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vogue91/pseuds/vogue91
Summary: He saw her, constantly. If he turned toward the passenger seat, it was her shape the one welcoming his gaze, as if she was actually there with him, as if she was really watching him drive, with the usual smirk on her face.





	New Eyes

 

Silence.

All around him, only the slight buzz of the engine. Only the monotonous muffled sound of the tyres on the asphalt.

And nothing else.

It was that silence he abhorred so much, that so much made him hope he could go deaf all of a sudden, so that he could imagine the din surrounding him. Instead he was forced to wrap himself in that creepy quietness, in that almost mortal calm.

He knew all too well that the ghosts of his mind were coming back to haunt him, in the worst possible moment. He wished he could’ve managed to shut his brain off, manage to forget what he was doing and _why_ he was doing it.

Andreas Engel had always believed to be a dauntless man. He had never refused to take a chance, to throw himself in the dark, to grasp without a qualm the hand of the unknown.

And yet right now he felt like a precociously aged twenty-six years old man, who had just received from life the malice of dissolution and the frozen embrace of agony.

He thought, thought, though. Or, more than thinking, he was lead to see, to gaze inside his mind for images becoming sharper as the minutes went by. He saw flashes of blonde hair, he saw violent blue eyes...

He saw her, constantly. If he turned toward the passenger seat, it was her shape the one welcoming his gaze, as if she was actually there with him, as if she was really watching him drive, with the usual smirk on her face.

 

 _“I really think that the guy you gave... well,_ gifted _you your driver’s licence is eligible for the death penalty.” she said, laughing. Andreas winced, shaking his head._

_“At least I got my driver’s licence, Christel.” he retorted, but he couldn’t really be in a bad mood._

_They were driving toward Freiburg, Christel’s hometown, and the landscape around them already started to betray the signs of their upcoming arrival into the Schwarzwald. Not that Andreas was wasting any time looking around. When he drove, he entered into an intimate relationship with the road, and all he saw was a grey mantle he had to traverse to reach his destination._

Christel had always hated that in him. He travelled to get there, and he knew that the girl did that for the sheer pleasure of it, as if there was something gypsy-like dormant inside of her, spawning in her the desire to move, to see, touch, smell and listen new places.

That day in the middle of the spring had been no exception. Andreas remembered every single moment of their last trip together. The last time the inside of his car had been filled with noises, colours, all the cheerfulness only her could bring there.

The last time. And he had found out he remembered the details only when his mind had surrendered to the thought he couldn’t have her anymore.

He pressed harder on the accelerator, which went hand in hand with the threshold of his pain.

It was starting to dawn, and he wasn’t sure he could stand the immensity of daylight, not when compared to the stretches of darkness harbouring inside him.

A buzz in his ears, different from the engine’s, preannounced the violent burst of more memories, memories which he knew to be more cutting than a million sharp blades.

 

_“Come on honey, try and enjoy the surroundings for a while! You never do that, you’re always focused on the drive, the stops, the kilometres... like this, you miss the best part of the journey.” Christel complained, putting a hand on his shoulder. Andreas sighed._

_“Chris, like you pointed out, I'm a really bad driver. Don’t you think it’s wiser for me to watch the road instead of the landscape?” he ironized, but the girl shook her head vigorously._

_“If you start looking around you become one with the road and the routes you take. The problem is not driving the car, but leading it through places which look incomprehensible to the human eye.” she murmured, looking rapt outside the window._

_He turned to glimpse at her, hit by her dreamy ways, capable of catching the mere essence of whatever her eyes laid on._

_He thanked his lucky star, as it often happened, for having gifted him of a life with her._

Months had gone by and he was on the same road, without the courage necessary to comply with the girl’s request. He still couldn’t look around, sure that he wasn’t going to be able to see anything but trees and fields, sky and sun. He knew that, had he dared to lay his eyes on something different from the road, he would’ve been hit hard by her face, pale as the clouds, by her hair being blonder than wheat, by her eyes far bluer than the sky itself.

He was damned busy thinking about his destination. The place where everything had begun, which was soon going to become the stage of the end.

The end of an era, the end of a love, the end of what he had considered a blessing, the purest happiness he had ever met on his path.

 

_“Dead?” he had murmured, as if that single word could really break the spell still keeping him in its reassuring embrace._

_“It’s been an accident, Herr Engel. A hit and run.” the policeman on the phone had kept going, but Andreas hadn't let him finish._

_“Fine. I understand. I’ll be right there.” he had said, the voice of someone who’s hanging in a nightmare he didn’t want to understand, just like the images insisting arrogantly to invade his mind._

In the following days he had wondered often what the man who had so brutally taken her life was looking at. If he was looking around, like she loved to do, oblivious to the road in front of him and the people who kept moving, who he had proven to ignore.

But he refused to allow that monster any trait making him similar to her. He refused to believe it could’ve really been just a moment of distraction, the fatal moment which had stolen from him everything he actually possessed.

Now he was going to give back the woman he had loved to those placed she loved so much, to those stretches where the green blended with the blue, where human beings seemed to be vulgar accessories of a divine game. He was going back to Freiburg, but this time he was going to enter the city as a defeated man.

 

All of a sudden, he stopped.

What was he doing? He was binding Christel to traditions all over again, he was doing everything she would’ve despised.

Follow the rules, do what was expected of him.

 _“You’re so ordinary, Andreas. So awfully predictable.”_ that’s what she would’ve said, hadn't death stolen the gift of the gab from her.

He pulled over and got off the car. He allowed himself a few moments to close his eyes and breathe in deeply, catching every scent lashing the air in that forgotten corner of the world.

Then he grabbed the urn which contained all that was left of tangible of Christel and walked across the guardrail, starting to run on the immense stretch of grass.

He reached the border of the Forest, then he forced himself to stop. With a solemn look on his face, he silently greeted the realm of Mother Nature, reverent, as if he was standing in front of the most fiery and powerful queen.

Then he slowly removed the lid and let the freezing wind surrounding him do the rest.

The transparent air around him got stained of a grey witness of death, but all he was seeing was capable of conveying only life to him.

That life that she wasn’t going to be able to taste anymore, that life that was mother and executioner of every being who dared spend their existence without ever stop and stare at sceneries like that one.

Christel was right, she had always been. There was something magical in the Schwarzwald, and his eyes on that day were finally capable of grasping the mysteries hidden behind those secular trees, as if the very own source of existence was concealed by that Forest.

That Andreas had given back to that source the woman he loved, in one last act of unhoped-for generosity. He had given back the ashes to the Earth, for it to turn it into something new, fresh, joyful. He knew that was what she would’ve wanted, and for once he didn’t care what other people were going to think of him, that he had gone mad or that the mourning had driven him mad.

He was going to let them talk, aware that it couldn’t be a grim day the one where Christel had obtained what she had always desired: melt with what she could only see before, in a sort of ancestral communion which was going to protect her for the rest of eternity.

He didn’t allow himself to stay and watch for long, knowing that had he stayed for one more moment, his heart and his eyes would’ve prevented him from moving one step away from there.

He slowly got back to the car and left, as if nothing had happened.

He had done something making him living testimony of Christel Sommer’s existence, done something making him worthy of her.

And he had decided he was going to do everything necessary for a part of her to keep living inside of him, for her voice to stay crystal clear in his mind.

 

_“Next time, try to hit in mor enjoying your journey”_

He tried to forget the asphalt, to forget the steering wheel under his hands, imagining to float over those places as if the wind was the one leading him.

 

_“A bend... the silence inside”_

Nothing was going to distract him from living those sensations intensively, leading him to uncharted territory, where everything tasted of pure existence.

 

_“An unexpected view”_

He found himself in places that his eyes had watched thousands of times, but that he had never truly seen. Now everything was vivid, like a picture engraved in his mind.

 

_“You’ll discover that it’s not where you are going that’s important”_

He was going to yet another place he deemed important, only because it was the place where Christel was born, there where streets, houses and buildings had seen her grow. He had never realized that Christel’s real home was inside every living thing around him.

 

_“But how you get there.”_

He wished he could’ve never reached Freiburg. He wished he could’ve ignored the road signs and keep wandering throughout that road, without knowing where they were going to lead him.

As a journey companion a woman who didn’t live anymore but who kept existing, and who was going to do that for all eternity.

There wasn’t going to be further need for tears, because he was only at the beginning of the journey, and he knew that Christel had only been faster than him, that she had reached another stop already, and that she was waiting for him. One day he was going to join her, and they would’ve finally left together, toward an endless journey. 


End file.
